Whither Wireless?

If municipal wireless were desirable, entrepreneurs would provide it. The move to offer WiFi as a public utility is misguided from the start:

First, it subsidizes wealthy people who can probably afford their own WiFi access; Second, it makes government get in the business of, well, doing business – which it shouldn’t be doing, and; Third, it forces taxpayers to bear the risks of venture. (For example, what if mesh networks were to take over from the current architecture? Wouldn’t that infrastructure investment be lost?) Gov’t shouldn’t any more try to pick winners and losers in markets than to get into the market to begin with.

Read more on my distaste for municipal tech ventures here. N&O has covered other failed experiments.

In any case, this Bill (HB 1587) would at least forbid denying access to real companies from providing their services competitively if they so chose. It’s one thing for the government to conduct business, it’s quite another for it to create its own monopoly through legislative fiat. This bill would forbid that, as far as I can tell.

Reader Interactions

Discussion

What about the telephone lines in the early days that were built to far flung communities? That wasn’t provided by companies because it wasn’t profitable to build infrastructure that only served a small number of people. Government built and paid for those lines, because it was deemed a public good to do so. Wireless internet in municipal areas is a similar situation. Perhaps after government has done it, businesses will follow and realize that there’s money to be made, but until they do, please defend your assertion that “makes government get in the business of, well, doing business – which it shouldn’t be doing” What is your logic behind this statement?
PS, and it’s MUNICIPAL, not MUNICIPLE.

Rural electrification requiring government is one of those old myths that won’t die. It would have happened anyway, and we wouldn’t still have a rural electrification bureaucracy (I kid not). Even still, the analogy fails. How is rural electrification (getting a service to sparse populations) relevantly similar to urban WiFi? Again, this is just a subsidy for the rich. We don’t need this, and its not going to ‘bring business.’ The logic of government not doing business is the logic whose syllogism ended with the Soviet Union’s collapse. Governments just don’t provide goods and services like markets do. Besides, poor people don’t buy laptops, they buy XBoxes and cellphones.

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